On the Queen’s birthday weekend I traveled to Sydney to perform at POC the MIC Sydney: “a performance night featuring people of colour spoken word, burlesque and more” that was held during Camp Betty “a radical political festival on sex, sexuality, gender and politics”. I read something close to the below text before performing my poetry and spoken word pieces, in regards to the context in which I was presenting.

For a few months now I have been creating poetry, spoken word and other writing under the name Harsh Browns about my experiences of racism. Much of my writing regards oppressive behaviours I’ve experienced from white people who consider themselves ‘progressive’ or part of ‘radical communities’.

It seems to me that there is comparative willingness for dialogue around politics of sex and gender but when it comes to talking about race, white people get really defensive or clam up, acting offended that I’ve challenged them because, they assert they’re ‘not racist’. As if a brown person couldn’t possibly have valid insight as to whether a white person’s behaviour may reflect institutional racism.

Most white people I’ve talked to seem to think racism is something other white people do. It’s a new experience for them to be challenged or what they feel is ‘misunderstood’ around issues of race.

And that’s in sharp contrast to my own lifetime of experience having my viewpoints regarding race so rarely affirmed or reflected back to me.

I’m sick of talking to white people about issues when they’re not considering how race relates to the conversation. I’m even more tired of talking to white people specifically about issues of race. We don’t begin the conversation on equal footing and I have so much more to emotionally risk from the ‘discussion’, that seems to change nothing except to increase my sense of alienation.

It’s more empowering for me to create art and writing about my experiences. Not for white people to understand me. Instead, I make it with hope that it’s for people who share my frustrations.

An event like POC the MIC that is organized by and features only people of colour, that prioritises people of colour first, each of us presenting our varied experiences, is personally empowering for me after spending so much time in supposedly ‘radical’ spaces in which I may be told I’m welcome but where white people are used to taking up most of the space and having their voices heard most of the time.

I performed the poems and spoken word pieces that I’ve posted on this blog. The night was personally empowering. Hearing the pain, anger, and other emotions in the voices of so many people of colour performing, as varied as each of our experiences are, was painfully affirming of my own feelings. Hearing the responses of other people of colour to my own performance was affirming of the energy I’ve been putting into writing about my experiences.

I feel like holding the details of these personal exchanges to myself and to those close to me. I came away from the weekend with a realisation that this permutable network of my own interpersonal relationships is the only concept of ‘community’ to which I feel comfortable to claim a sense of belonging. I feel affirmed that my feelings of anger at, and alienation from queer and radical communities, as I have known them, are justified. I feel empowered to let go of the expectation of ‘inclusion’ in what others consider ‘our community’. I’ve tried for so long to believe otherwise, but it’s always been a peripheral existence. I’ve never had the feeling of ‘home’ that I hear many others speak of in regards to ‘queer’, ‘punk’, and other ‘radical communities’, though I’ve inhabited spaces identifying as such, because of aspects of my own identity. Many people seem to speak with an assumed sense of belonging to ‘our community’, a sense that I suspect is linked to privilege that I have not experienced. When people speak of ‘our community’, I hear them speak of their idea of community. When white people ponder “What our community needs to do to be inclusive of people of colour…”, they centre whiteness in ‘our community’, and the conversation, and I feel further marginalized. I’m not interested in being ‘included’ on these terms, to be allowed onto the peripheries of an illusion of community that I do not believe in.

Many people who consider themselves ‘radical’ seem to speak of their idea of community as if it is an independent entity that is possible to exist, for the most part, exclusive of the oppressions they associate with broader culture. If there is anything more than a nod of acknowledgment of oppression within their idea of community, many individuals seem unable to acknowledge their own oppressive behaviours, nor their privileges. I’ve been to enough spaces that aim to provide a ‘safer space’ from x, y and z phobias and from racism, but in regards to my sense of alienation in that space, I may as well have been walking down Swanston Street in Melbourne city on a Friday night. At least there I wouldn’t have an expectation of belonging, one that is never fulfilled.

I’ve realised that I can only try to find a sense of ‘home’ within myself. And I did feel that sense of home within myself in the empowering space of POC the MIC. I don’t consider the people who performed and organised to be part of a ‘person of colour community’. I’m not falling for another illusion of community that expects a sense of belonging that will eventually disappoint. These realisations are not sad, nor individualistic; I will happily put my energy and support into relationships and projects, with individuals that reciprocate these energies, without defining my interpersonal networks as a ‘community’. It is not from a lacking in me that I claim not to belong to a ‘community’, it’s the ‘communities’ that are lacking, and it’s an empowering choice to claim ‘I do not belong’ to a community, only to myself.

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